My Favourite Films of 2006

1. The New World (Terrence Mallick, USA): There are film makers, and there are artists. Mallick is in the latter category. On the surface, The New World retells the John Smith/Pocahontas love story amidst the grimy mess of the Jamestown colony in early seventeenth-century Virginia. Yet it’s so much more. It’s a hymn to the unity of man and nature, to the meeting of two cultures, to the rhythm of the seasons, to the simplest of loves. Both Rousseaus – philosopher of the noble savage and painter of the dark wilderness – make their appearances here. Long wordless scenes linger over rivers and streams, over leaves and birds and trees. The film is a pantheist paean, a song to the earth mother. War, the topic of his previous film The Thin Red Line, makes only a brief appearance here when the English colonists fight a short and bloody battle with the natives. Colin Farrell does good work in one of his more restrained roles, while newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher is charming as the Indian princess who is never named in the film. I felt a real sadness leaving Mallick’s world of beauty only to re-enter the banality of a shopping mall. A sad masterpiece.

2. The Departed (Martin Scorsese, USA): A complex cop-and-robbers drama with an outstanding cast which centers around two “rats”: Leonardo Dicaprio as a young cop who pretends to be drummed out of the force in order in order to become a member of Frank Costello’s (Jack Nicholson) criminal gang to collect evidence, and Matt Damon as a superficially “good guy” cop who is actually Costello’s hand-picked police spy. The setting and background moves away from Scorsese’s traditional Italian Mafia turf (although there are some Italian gangsters) to South Boston’s Irish working- class neighborhoods, with most of the actors attempting the New England accent successfully.  Mark Wahlberg also deserves kudos for his potty-mouthed honest cop who locks horns with Damon. Some real surprises, but not of the cheap-and-don’t-make-sense variety. Easily one of the best three or four films Scorsese has ever made.

3. Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, USA) – Mel the director surprises us all with his portrait of the last days of Mayan glory filmed in the jungles of southern Mexico. All the dialogue is in Mayan (don’t worry, it’s subtitled). His picture of the Mayans is at the same time fair, dramatic and bloody, refusing to turn away from the centrality of human sacrifice in their religious rituals: Adam Ferguson would be proud. Interestingly, much of the second half of the film is one long chase sequence, but on foot – no supercharged-up cars or Vin Diesel in sight! There are inaccuracies: the Maya would not be surprised to see a city or an eclipse, and were better farmers than pictured here – not to mention the fact that the art and architecture is anachronistic (the Tikal-style city state existed centuries before the time frame of the movie). The main character, Jaguar’s Paw, comes across as a classic hero despite the fact that he’s not a famous actor and doesn’t speak a word of English in the film. On top of all this, the film is an allegory about the decline of civilizations by rot from within – especially those which sacrifice their young men in futile attempts to placate their gods (whether in the jungles of the Yucatan or the deserts of Iraq). It’s also an ecological fable: we see bodies, toxic slime, and disease despoiling the environment of the Mayan city. The last scene is quite a shock, though in keeping with recent “revisionist” dramas on pre-Columbian native cultures. Mel has given us something to chew on here, making most forgot his drunken anti-Semitic outburst (for more on anti-Semitism, see Borat). Good on ya, Mad Mel!

4. Borat (Sasha Baron Cohen, Britain) – Something of a cultural phenomenon, the story of Baron Cohen’s fictional Kazakh journalist on his tour of America is a walking, talking thumbed nose at political correctness. Borat’s outrageously outdated attitudes towards gender and race – which liberal academics no doubt laugh at with a deep sense of guilt – disguise a clever put down of current American political culture. His passionate (and bloody-minded) pro-Bush speech at a Western rodeo, followed by a mangling of the US national anthem, are classic comedy. A lusty smashing of the sacred idols of politically correct liberalism, with apologies to whoever’s sister is only the fifth-best prostitute in all of Kazakhstan!

5. Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, USA): An intriguing film about the unholy marriage between American foreign policy and Arab oil. Complex and involving, it takes a while before we figure out the relationships between George Clooney’s somewhat sad sack CIA agent Bob, a reform-minded Arab prince played by Deep Space 9’s Alexander Siddig, a Geneva-based financier played by Matt Damon, various American politicians, a Texas-based oil company, and a powerful Washington legal firm. In the end oil is paid for with blood on the sand, as the clever Americans use their high-tech gadgets to make sure they can keep their SUVs full of gas. By the way, the title refers to the perfectly pro-Western Arab super-state dreamed of by the American neo-cons. The common critique of the film is that it’s too long and confusing, but I chalk that up to the attention-deficit age we live in.

6. 300 (Zach Synder, USA): A very faithful filming of Frank Miller’s graphic novel concerning the Battle of Thermopylae that’s taken some heat for its negative portrayal of the Persians. Admittedly, the picture of the Persian leaders, especially Xerxes, is ridiculous, as is the Persian “monster” with blades for hands, the malformed Greek villain Ephialtes, and the genetically inbred Spartan Ephors. Yet the images of the ordinary Spartan and Persian soldiers were more spot on, as is much of the dialogue, which could have come straight out of Herodotus’ Histories. I was delighted to hear such lines as “come back with it or on it” and the exchange between the Persian leader and the Spartan soldier where the former warns of having so many archers that they will blot out the sun with their arrows, to which the Spartan replies “good, then we shall have our fight in the shade.” These came exactly when Herodotus would have placed them if he were alive today and screenwriting. And to settle the political debate, for the most part the Greeks were fighting for their liberty against a great Empire ruled by a monarch with divine pretensions, even if Spartan society was a rigid oligarchy. So the claim that the Greeks were fighting for their national freedom and for the rule of law over despotism was valid. As in Sin City, the film uses live actors working against blank screens, the background provided by CGI. The look of these backgrounds is generally gorgeous and historically accurate (at least in terms of the architecture). Gerard Butler is great as King Leonidas: he’s the heir to Sean Connery’s uber-masculine action hero status.

7. Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, USA): A little black and white film with a documentary feel about Edward R. Murrow’s cautious battle with Eugene McCarthy and his anti-communist henchmen in mid-50s America. Clooney plays Murrow’s affable producer Fred Friendly. Intercut with film scenes we get television images of McCarthy, Ray Cohn, Dwight Eisenhower, and other major players of the day. A cautionary tale about how even the most affluent and supposedly democratic system can make us fear speaking freely if this speech can lead to a loss of our livelihood, a lesson academics today should keep in mind. Although Murrow prevailed in the 50s, the mood in the US is no longer too friendly to such liberal sentiments. His on-air soliloquies only go to show how mediocre much of TV commentary is today. Clooney has publicly disavowed the notion that the film is a parable for post-9/11 Americans: sure George, nudge nudge, wink wink.

8. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, USA): A trippy film about three drug addicts played by Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. based on the Philip K. Dick novella of the same name using the rotoscoping technique that Linklater first tried out in his earlier film Waking Life. But this time around the rotoscoping is more assured and detailed, shading into photographic realism in several scenes. Reeves plays Bob Arctor, an undercover cop investigating the paranoid world of drug dealers and addicts taking the super-drug “D”, who ultimately discovers a sinister corporate behind the drug’s spread. Winona Ryder is also effective as Keanu’s anti-sex druggie girlfriend. Perhaps the first Dick adaptation true to his style of chemically-inspired reality disintegration.

9. Amazing Grace (Michael Apted, Great Britain): A straight-up, somewhat old-fashioned historical biopic of one of the great men of British history, William Wilberforce, who fought many years to abolish slavery in the British Empire (he succeeded in ending the slave trade in 1807, long before the Americans did). Played as a determined but complex figure by Ioan Gruffud, we get a delicious look at the corrupt but still useful and functional British parliamentary system of the late 18th century. Apted also sows in some contemporary parallels as Wilberforce’s old friend Prime Minister William Pitt repeatedly warns him that the country isn’t “ready” for such radical changes in its definition of civil rights, especially under the pressures of war with Revolutionary France and later Napoleon, clearly hinting at the curbing of liberties in Britain and America over the last six years. A rich historical exploration that confuses the filmgoer with its title and poster, with hint at a Harlequin-style romance rather than the much more serious subject matter that it is.

10. Match Point (Woody Allen, USA/Britain): Allen’s meditation on the power of luck in our lives. What if you turned left instead of right at some crucial intersection? Attended one school instead of another? The many “what ifs” of our lives are symbolized in the film by a tennis ball hitting a net then pausing in mid-air before falling… on which side? This sense of randomness is repeated over and over in the film. The story centers on the romantic dalliances of tennis player Jonathan Rhys Meyers, his mixing with the English upper class, and the crime he commits to escape responsibility for one of his misdeeds. Will he suffer Raskolnikov’s fate? A very British film, with almost nothing of Allen’s New York liberal intellectual humour in evidence. In fact, Allen reigns in his narcissism by not even including a Woody substitute in his film. To quote Machiavelli, fortune is the ruler of half our actions.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, USA/France/UK/Canada): A low key, un-Michael Moorish documentary which returns to the question posed by Frank Capra’s World War II propaganda films: “why do Americans fight foreign wars?” Jarecki’s answer is given subtly, and even contradicted by a few conservative commentators like Richard Perle we see interviewed, but is clear enough: the American economy and political machine are too intertwined with the military to have any choice other than produce war materials and to use them in foreign adventures. The film returns time and time again to President Eisenhower’s 1960 farewell address, when he warned the American to beware the undue influence of the military-industrial complex. All the foreign interventions the US military has made since 1945 seem to bear out Eisenhower’s concerns: in Iraq, for instance, it is indeed the crude behind the showdown with Saddam. Added to military-industrial-political triangle of power in the US, as Jarecki points out, is a fourth point: the think tanks and which provide the intellectual fuel to keep the war machine going.

Joyeux Noel/Merry Christmas (Christian Carion, France/German/Britain/Romania): A somewhat melodramatic and sentimental film that all the same paints a telling portrait of the “fraternization” between Scottish and French troops and their German enemies on Christmas Eve 1914. Soldiers in the trenches decide to call a truce with each other and enjoy some Christmas cheer and football in No Man’s Land. These fraternizations really happened, and caused no little consternation for the bloodthirsty generals of the day. Carion also deals with the religious unity between the warring natoins as a Scottish priest delivers mass in Latin and most of the men join in. The sense of decency of most of the troops is clear, with Carion showing the usually castigated Germans as a basically fair (if somewhat arrogant) people: in fact, the French are the most suspicious of the three groups. Carion also nicely captures the mood of late Imperial Germany very nicely: these Germans aren’t just Nazis in disguise. An interesting exploration on the pointlessness of war and the artificiality of national differences, punched home in the last scene where the disgraced German unit hums a ballad they heard played by a Scots piper as they ride a train destined for the Russian front. My only critique is that some of the staginess of the production shines through: the snow is clearly fake; there are no clouds of mist coming from the character’s mouths as they speak in the supposedly frigid air; and when a German soldier and his girlfriend sing some classical music at a party, the music is obviously dubbed. But a fine addition to the anti-war filmic canon.

Red Road (Andrea Watson, Scotland): The story of Jackie (Kate Dickie), whose job it is to watch for crime on the mean streets of Glasgow on a row of monitors connected to CCTV cameras from a police office. As she looks for the slightest hints of odd events the links to Foucault’s Panopticon, Blowup and Blowout become obvious. Jackie sees the petty criminal Clyde, who killed her husband and child in a car accident whilst under the influence of drugs on the streets near the Red Road flats after an early release from prison. She decides to seduce him, have sex, then blame him for raping her in order to get revenge and return him to prison. But all is not as it seems. A very restrained story that meditates on our culture of mass surveillance and moral problems associated mourning the dead and whether justice can be reduced to revenge. Oddly, subtitled so that North Americans can understand the Glaswegian accent, which I found entirely comprehensible for almost all the characters.

Inside Man (Spike Lee, USA): A bank heist film with a twist, with Denzel Washington as a New York cop facing off against Clive Owen as the very clever head of the gang of robbers. Interesting because Owen is no easy catch: his game is as much about misdirection as overt violence. And the reason he broke into the bank in the first place isn’t just to steal a bunch of loot, but to take something of a very mysterious nature from the deposit box of the bank’s founder and owner played by the affable Christopher Plummer. The way the robbers escape is also rather clever. For once Spike Lee makes a fine film without preaching!

An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, USA): Little more than filmed version of Al Gore’s talks on the dangers of global warming, an interesting and important work all the same both for the message it tries to give Americans and for the thoroughness of Gore’s research and arguments. It also hints indirectly at the incompetence of the American political system, which narrowly rejected Gore for Bush in 2000 while sticking its collective head in the sand as glaciers and polar ice caps melt thanks to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And Gore is much warmer and funnier than the media portrayed him back when he was running for president. A bit thin as a film, but top rate as a political documentary.

The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary Harron, USA): A straight-up biopic of the “notorious” pinup girl of the fifties filmed mostly in black and white, with splashes of glorious colour here and there. Harron reins in any moralizing about Page’s career – oddly enough, she was quite religious, and went into risqué modeling because she thought that God had given her this special talent, and then left the biz when she thought His divine support was gone. Interestingly nostalgic about counted as “salacious” entertainment in the day, especially as compared with modern porn: Page’s fetish and bondage films now look like Buster Keaton comedies. The congressional sub-committee’s hearings on juvenile delinquency seem like conversations from an impossibly bygone age. Another odd ting is that Page comes away relatively unscarred, a far cry from the horror stories from Dworkin, McKinnon and crew about ex-sex stars like Linda Lovelace. Gretchen Mol is dead on target with her portrayal of Bettie, playing her as part ingénue, part down-home simple Southern gal.

X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, USA): Given the trepidation surrounding the film based on Net warnings about director Rattner’s hack status, X3 is really not that bad. There are elements of the classic “Dark Phoenix Saga” by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in the X-Men comics of 1979-1980 (e.g. Jean Grey’s holding in Cyclops’ optic blasts as they kiss), though the rise of the Phoenix AKA Jean Grey’s psionically-boosted Id is largely secondary to Magneto’s attempt to fight a war against humanity at the head of a mutant army. There’s also a nice glimpse at a Sentinel, the comic-book X-Men’s mortal enemies, in a training session. Hugh Jackman is consistently Woverine-ish, while the mind games between Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto are once again the acting highlight of the X-film. The special effects are marvelous – notably the flaming car-missiles. It would have been better to tell either the Phoenix or the Magneto story, but Hollywood of late is obsessed with the biggest bang for the buck. The film was obviously geared to comics fans: about a dozen mutants are introduced or featured (excluding the original X-Men) with only hints of their powers – or even their names. Yet I didn’t find this parade of mutants the least distracting, as some reviewers have claimed – it fitted the story, and actually demanded that viewers pay attention!